


Dandy in the Underworld

by dear_tiger



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Case Fic, Horror, M/M, Mystery, POV Outsider
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-11-04
Updated: 2013-11-04
Packaged: 2017-12-31 11:01:53
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 11,608
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1030923
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/dear_tiger/pseuds/dear_tiger
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>They say there is a secret game in Las Vegas, the greatest one of all, in which the hero plays against the dragon for three nights, and the prize is a wish granted, and the penalty is death. A new player arrives to try his luck, only to discover that the game is held in a dump of a house in the desert and that the dragon is a dude named Dean, chained to the house by the ankle. The hero soon realizes that he cannot leave unless he wins. The dragon is growing blood-thirsty, the game makes no sense, and the hero’s only hope are the clues dropped by the dragon’s brother who’s just along for the ride.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Dandy in the Underworld

**Author's Note:**

> [Art Master Post](http://cassiopeia7.livejournal.com/363080.html) by cassiopeia 7
> 
> Beta by sonofabiscuit77 and counteragent
> 
> Story notes are [on LJ](http://dear-tiger.livejournal.com/77523.html) if you want them.

“This is a prank, right?” said Ivan, after he had given the house in front of him a good minute to reveal itself as something other than what it appeared to be. Armed security at every door would’ve made him feel good, or maybe some cocktail waitresses, naked except for those French maid aprons. Even a roulette wheel glimpsed through a crack in the curtains would do. But the house was just your regular desert dump with dusty windows, sun-bleached red curtains, short spiny bushes and cacti growing in clusters around the porch and something in the back that appeared to be an old-fashioned covered well. 

Maybe it would be totally different in the daylight, he thought. He considered the house for a bit longer. Maybe not.

Ivan turned to the casino security guard who was unloading Ivan’s suitcase from the trunk of his Lexus. “My man, let me assure you that I’m not the kind of guy you want to be pulling pranks on. We clear?”

“No pranks.” The guard wheeled Ivan’s white suitcase around the car, rising clouds of dust, and left it by Ivan’s feet instead of taking it to the door. “The greatest game in Las Vegas – you wanted, you paid for it, you got it.”

“We’re not even in Vegas anymore!” And Ivan spread his arms to include the empty highway in the distance, the flat land for miles around them with twisted dark silhouettes of trees here and there, and the mountains on the horizon. 

“Ring the doorbell,” said the guard. Then he got into his car, backed out of the driveway and headed back in the direction of the Strip. Ivan watched the taillights, until they didn’t look like taillights anymore but like red eyes of a creature lurking in the desert. 

People talked about the Dragon of Las Vegas. Good people, too, not the bullshitting kind. He had been on the Strip for a week, growing tired of the Black Jack and the roulette. More, he said, give me more, I heard there was _more_. There were rumors of people playing the highest-stakes game there ever was in Las Vegas and coming out unimaginably rich. More people entered the game and were never heard from again. Ivan heard the story for the first time a year ago, at his nineteenth birthday party, from his uncle who swore he knew a winner personally. Ivan didn’t believe a word of it then, but he dreamed of it that night and the night after – the Dragon of Las Vegas, the greatest game there ever was, where the stakes were high and the prize was better than money. It was a gamble of a lifetime, they said, and they were not the bullshitting kind.

Then again, there was this house.

Ivan sighed and rolled his suitcase onto the porch, above which a blue light burned, dive-bombed by bugs. Ivan waved a few away from his face and accidentally hit an ugly wind chime, making it rattle. The thing appeared to be made of chicken bones and a skull of something that might’ve been a rodent. He could see the resemblance to a dragon if he squinted.

“What the fuck,” he mumbled under his breath, poking at the wind chime. “Cheap-o.” But there was nothing else to do here in the middle of the night, in the heart of nowhere, so he rang the doorbell. 

The guy who answered didn’t look like a pit boss, and neither did he look like the Dragon of Las Vegas. Ivan gave him a head-to-toe, not bothering to hide his disappointment. He was in his thirties, with short hair, dressed in a Pink Floyd t-shirt and jeans with holes in them in all the wrong places, probably from that one time he got hung up jumping the fence. He looked like one of those ex male models who had been out of the business for long enough to get rough around the edges.

“Take a picture,” said the guy, “it’ll last longer.” And he stepped aside, holding the door open.

Ivan peered into the house, hoping against hope that naked cocktail waitresses might still be a go. No dice. The hallway opened into a kind of a living room that Ivan normally wouldn’t set a foot into – the kind with mismatched furniture and old books everywhere, the poor people kind. Just then, the guy moved again and something clanked by his left foot. Ivan missed it in the dark, but now he saw that the freak had a shackle and chain around his ankle, and the end of it stretched back into the house.

“You’re letting the bugs in,” the guy said. 

Maybe this was a part of the game, Ivan thought as he followed the house’s owner through the living room and into the kitchen, trying not to step on the chain. Maybe this was a design of sorts – the greatest, most secret game in Vegas hidden in plain sight, disguised as a cheap spook show. He could roll with that, though he wasn’t sure how he felt about it. Would a basement room under the MGM be that terrible? Christ. 

“So hey, my man.” Ivan sat down in the chair that the guy pushed toward him, by the kitchen table. “Listen, this whole Joe the Plumber act is awesome, but I’m here for the Dragon of Las Vegas.” The name, which gave him chills of excitement yesterday, now fell flat, like something out of a fairytale he was far too old for.

“I figured,” the dude said. “You want coffee?” 

The wall clock showed fifteen to three in the morning. The night was still young. Ivan shrugged, and the guy pulled two cups from the cupboard and filled them to the brim. Ivan sniffed his coffee before taking a careful sip. It was good stuff, too good for this house and this dude – the first evidence that maybe there was more to the place than Halloween paraphernalia. Ivan felt his good mood returning, with the excitement that was with him earlier that night starting to creep back in. He was in the right place. He had found it.

“I’m Dean,” said the guy, offering his hand over the table, and Ivan shook it briefly.

“Ivan.”

Dean rolled his eyes. “Ivan. What the fuck are they naming you kids these days?” 

“Yeah, whatever. So we play this game or what?” And he looked around the kitchen for some cards, chips, something. The table was old, with cracked polish and pale rings of discoloration left by cups. There was a fridge, a sink and a gas stove – the usual stuff. A string of dried red peppers was hung in the window, like a Christmas garland. Old spider web fluttered in the corner up by the ceiling, disturbed by the draft.

Dean leaned back in his chair, studying Ivan over his coffee mug. The chain scratched against the floor when he moved his foot. “This is how we play: you stay in this house for three days and three nights, and each night I will think of an object. You have to guess what object I’m thinking of.” Either there was some party treat in the coffee, or the light had started to drain from the kitchen as Dean spoke. The shadows deepened in the corners and in his face. Ivan leaned closer. “If you guess correctly three times, you get a wish granted, anything you want. If you lose, the dragon eats you.”

The room went quiet, so quiet that Ivan could hear some small things rustling in the brush outside the house. The clock over the stove had stopped at some point while they were talking.

“Anything I want?” Ivan said. “Like a blank check? Billions of dollars?”

Dean shrugged. “Sure, man.”

“To be the President of the United States?”

“Why not?”

“How about a Parisian supermodel falling in love with me? Can you do that, or is it one of those ‘limitations’?” Ivan made quotation marks in the air and felt a giggling fit rising up from inside of him. “What if I wanted to shake hands with God?”

“Dude, if you win, ask for a blowjob from God, for all I care. No limitations.”

Ivan sat back in his chair and thought about the situation. What was it that Uncle Cornelius said happened to the guy he knew, the guy who played this game and won? Ivan had done three lines of coke before that conversation and had little patience for slow-speaking middle-aged relatives. It had something to do with the Caribbean – that was almost for sure. Uncle Cornelius’s face came to him now, with a drooping eyelid and a constellation of brown moles on his cheek. What did he say happened to the guy? 

Dean leaned over the table, and Ivan blinked, coming out of his trance. “I’m not kidding about the dying part either.” 

Anything he wanted. Absolutely anything in the world. He looked back at Dean and smiled.

Dean rolled his eyes. “I’ll show you to your room.”

~~~~

For the rest of the night, Ivan slept, despite the strong coffee, despite the excitement. He was back in a candle-lit ballroom of his family mansion. Uncle Cornelius stood before him, huge like he was when Ivan was six, with a mustache like a dark strip of forest on the mountain slope that was his strong, solid body. He had a scary drooping eyelid, and one half of his face was always flushed. Uncle Cornelius was terrifying tonight like he hadn’t been in fifteen years. He held a champagne flute in his hand that reflected the ballroom and turned everyone into an impossibly stretched monster. Ivan gaped at him.

“Glue,” boomed Uncle Cornelius. “The dragon is made of glue. The Glue of Las Vegas!”

Outside his dream, in that place that Ivan could reach if only he turned about his left shoulder fast enough – there, something heavy and made of iron dragged along the floorboards, slowly, as if someone was trying not to wake him but couldn’t help making noise. Slowly. He heard footsteps – two, three. He whipped his head around, but there were only his parents’ guests, stretched out and bent like he saw them in Uncle Cornelius’s glass. The real world was just barely out of reach, and in the real world, someone was coming too close to his bed. 

“Uncle Cornelius,” he said to the towering gentleman. “I think there was something in the coffee.” He scrunched up his face and saw the reflection of it in the champagne glass, horrifically distorted. “I think I’ve been drugged.”

“Dragged,” Uncle Cornelius corrected. And then, “Glue!”

In the real world, someone was dragging a claw along the wall. Someone just sat down on his bed and said into his ear, “Now you’re in the game.”

Uncle Cornelius tapped Ivan’s forehead with the glass. “It’s all in the glue, boy. Dragons are all in the glue.”

The ballroom was made of glue. Glue held Ivan firmly in place and wouldn’t let him get back into reality. When he tried to lift his hand off the table, the table stretched after it like gum. Someone whispered to him, “Now you can’t leave. If you give up, you lose. If you lose, the dragon eats you.” And he felt, distantly, a talon touch the tip of his nose.

~~~~

The morning came on too bright, too early. Ivan climbed out of his cocoon of sweat-soaked sheets the minute he was awake, though his head still felt muggy. But if he stayed in bed for a minute longer, he could fall back asleep and dream of Uncle Cornelius in that ballroom, and worse, someone could sneak into his room again while he slept. Feeling only partially oriented, Ivan pulled on yesterday’s clothes and stumbled into the kitchen. It was blessedly empty. He dumped nearly half a bottle of dish soap into his cup and scrubbed it spotless, then repeated with the coffee pot before making a fresh batch. The fucking roofies were not going to get him again.

Dean was nowhere to be seen. The freaky chain he wore was apparently long enough to let him move freely all over the house, and coils of it lay in the hallway. One end snaked down the stairs into the basement. Ivan gave it a wide berth when he took his coffee out on the back porch, hoping that the morning air would help clear his head. 

It was still early, and the light was a gentle shade of blue that made the landscape look delicate. The heat would come on soon, but for now the air was cool. Ivan sat down on the porch and pulled out a phone. Maybe Uncle Cornelius could tell him how exactly that other guy won and got his wish that may or may not have involved the Caribbean. How the hell is a guy supposed to know what some creeper got his mind set on? He could be thinking of mouse droppings, or a tin spoon, or a pterodactyl. 

There was no reception. Ivan stared at the blank screen and shook the phone. Nope. No reception. 

He was suddenly aware of the sound of a car engine which he’d been unconsciously ignoring, but it got closer and closer, until it was unmistakably in front of the house, where it stopped. It was a big engine, too noisy for the casino Lexus. Was that good news or bad news that someone else apparently arrived? A car door creaked open and slammed, and Ivan heard footsteps approaching. He picked up his coffee mug, following some vague thought about wanting a weapon, and waited.

The guy who came around the house was about Dean’s age, and probably as tall. He was wearing leather pants, and held to his side was a flat box of mangoes. He didn’t look at all surprised to see Ivan there.

“Hi,” the guy said, before depositing his mangoes on the porch and sitting down next to Ivan. “I’m Sam.”

Ivan shook his hand. The dude looked pretty normal, but then again, so did Dean before he dumped drugs into Ivan’s coffee and crept around his bedroom while he slept, rattling his chain and scratching the walls. Ivan found claw marks on them when he woke up.

He was still holding Sam’s hand, squeezing it absently. Sam was smiling like maybe he understood. 

“I’m Ivan. Who are you supposed to be?” 

“I live here. You want a mango?”

Ivan shook his head. Sam produced a knife from an honest-to-god ankle strap and started peeling a mango for himself, sweet-smelling juice dripping off his fingers. 

“So,” Ivan cleared his throat, “so you know Dean?”

“Dean’s my brother. What about him?”

“You know that he’s a,” and Ivan stopped, not knowing how to finish. The Dragon of Las Vegas, Christ. He had thought it was some symbolic name, like maybe there was a Chinese dude running some really awesome card game on the top floor of the MGM. He wasn’t expecting a spook show, with the “claws and chains and guarded treasure” type of dragon.

“The Dragon of Las Vegas?” Sam said. “Sure. Dragons have brothers, too.” 

The way he was so matter-of-fact about this shit was starting to get on Ivan’s nerves. “You know the part where he’s, like, going to eat me if I lose at this game, right?” His voice came out higher than he liked.

Sam finished taking the mango’s skin off in a single peel. He dropped the long strip between his feet and licked the blade before setting the knife aside. He weighted the fruit in his hand, squinting at it. When he spoke it was quietly, almost whispering, and Ivan had to lean closer to hear.

“Look, no one can win this game by plain guessing. What kind of a game would that be if no one could win it? There will be clues.”

“Clues!” Ivan snapped his fingers, and Sam gave him a disapproving look. Ivan dropped his voice. “That’s what Uncle Cornelius told me. I remember now. There have to be clues.” 

“That’s right. Dean wasn’t born like this, you know. And I’m not thrilled about my brother eating flesh when you guys lose.”

Flesh. The word was like an ice nugget dropped behind the collar of Ivan’s shirt, making him shiver. The feeling from his dream returned – of a sharp talon touching his nose.

Sam cut slices from the mango and ate them one by one, playing casual. Ivan wondered if Dean was watching them from the house right now. Sam didn’t look at him when he whispered, “I’ll help as much as I can. Just don’t fuck it up.”

“Got it. I won’t. Hey, thanks, my man.” 

Sam tossed the pit out into the desert, picked up his knife and the box and went inside the house. He didn’t take his boots off, and Ivan could hear his footsteps go down the hallway and into the kitchen.

“Hey Sammy,” said Dean’s voice from inside.

Ivan put down his now cold coffee and very quietly followed around the house to the kitchen window, keeping close to the wall and below the windowsill level. The outside air must’ve helped because he was feeling much better, in full control of his body and with his mind sharp as ever. The adrenalin probably didn’t hurt either. 

Dean was saying, “Dude, did you walk into a grocery store in those pants? Did people shove money in them?”

“It’s Vegas. Like anybody cares.”

Ivan stood up just enough to peer into the window, through the slit in the drawn curtains. Dean was leaning against the counter next to the sink, scratching his ribs in a slow absent manner of someone not entirely awake. Sam was washing his hands. They were standing practically hip to hip, and that closeness in the large space was somehow weird.

“I care,” Dean said. “I get a major case of second-hand embarrassment just from picturing you walk around like this in public.”

“Second-hand embarrassment is what they call it now?” And then Sam put a hand on Dean’s junk. Ivan blinked and backed away from the window, caught by surprise. 

“Brother my ass,” he said under his breath, and slapped a hand over his mouth.

Things in the kitchen, thankfully, didn’t look like they were heading into Porn Land just yet. Dean stepped away from the sink and was playing with a mango, tossing it from hand to hand. “You met our guest yet?”

“Out back. He’s a little young.”

“Yeah, well.” Dean yawned. “He asked, he paid, he got it. You want coffee?”

“Nah. I’m going to pass out.” Sam unzipped his pants and wriggled out of them, kicking them into the corner of the kitchen before turning back around to splash water in his face over the sink. 

Dean made an appreciative noise. “Take it all off, baby.”

Sam flipped him the bird over his shoulder. Dean cackled, picked up the pants and went out of the kitchen with them, the chain dragging after him. Sam stood leaning over the sink for a few more minutes, half-asleep on his feet. Then he shook himself off and left, too.

~~~~

At dusk, the whole house seemed saturated with the heavy, sweet smell of ripe mangoes. Sam had left them out on the table for the day, and now Ivan couldn’t help but think of those scenes in cartoon, where visible streaks of aroma snaked around corners and through the doorways. Whenever Ivan turned around too fast, he smelled mangoes.

He slept when Sam did, through the day’s heat, determined to not miss his clue. His sleep was fragmented, anxious, but no one came to bother him this time. Dragons required sleep like the rest of them – go figure. He woke up once around noon, urgently needing a trip to the bathroom, and ended up at the wrong door on his way back. In the room with blackout curtains, he glimpsed the freak show duo sleeping in a shared bed, with Sam facedown and hugging the pillow and Dean stretched out diagonally across the bed, his head against Sam’s ribs, his hand in the small of Sam’s back. Ivan winced, backed away and tripped over the chain. 

He slept again and dreamed about flying his gold-plated personal jet over the Lesser Antilles, only he couldn’t land because the islands were the protruding vertebrae of a dragon sleeping under the sea. The fuel was running low. He woke up with his heart in his throat. 

Sam and Dean were awake and out in the back yard, judging by the sounds coming from the outside. They could wait. Ivan wandered into the kitchen first, and there was a large turkey sandwich laid out for him on the plate. Ivan’s first instinct was to toss it into garbage. He stood over it for a few minutes, trying to decide what benefit Dean could possibly draw from drugging him again. In the end, he ate the sandwich slowly, washing it down with tap water and waiting to stuff two fingers down his throat at the first sign of lightheadedness. 

The freaks must’ve been having a fight. Ivan heard curses, snorts and feet shuffling, and finally he had to go and see after someone slammed into the wall of the house. They were sparring out in the yard, both covered in pale dust from head to toe like they rolled in it. The sight of them made Ivan think first of a pair of golems made of clay, two fairytale monsters, and then it made him think of his father’s bodyguards fighting to kill time or for bets. It was an unpleasant thought that made his skin crawl. So the Dragon of Las Vegas had drugs – and not the fun kind either – a few loose screws in his head, apparently ate human flesh and he could probably hit like a cement truck. 

Ivan was stuck in an isolated place with hillbilly cannibals. It wasn’t nearly as funny as it should’ve been.

Sam’s lip was bleeding. Dean was dragging his foot a little, the one with the chain around it but didn’t seem bothered by it. Ivan watched them circle each other and roll around, until he became convinced that Sam wasn’t going to shout out the clue through a mouthful of dirt, and so he wandered off to look for a note, a picture, a word spelled out in fridge magnets, anything. Would it kill Sam to just leave a goddamn note? When he came back to the porch, empty-handed and empty-headed, Sam had Dean on his back and was sitting on his chest, pinning down Dean’s arms with his knees. He had a mango in one hand.

“Fuck off, Sam,” Dean said. “I drank a Dr. Pepper yesterday. It totally counts.”

“Does not. It doesn’t actually have any cherries in it.”

“Sam.”

Sam bit into the fruit’s skin and pulled a strip of peel down with his teeth. He looked like a twelve year old boy who just won a fight to prove something, with that twinkle in his eyes. He smiled down at Dean and crushed the mango against his mouth, and then Dean spat pulp at him, and then they were rolling in the dust again.

_They really are brothers,_ Ivan thought, watching from inside the house. _Holy shit, they really are._ So they were incestuous hillbilly cannibals then. Distracted by that thought, he almost missed the moment when Sam looked straight at him and winked.

~~~~

It had to be at midnight. Such were the rules, Dean told him earlier as he washed dust and fruit juice from his face. Things like this had to happen at midnight. Ivan turned that thought in his head over and over, trying to find it funny, feeling deep in his guts that the Dragon of Las Vegas should’ve been funny, or embarrassing at the least. But fifteen minutes to midnight, he stood on the porch and contemplated the stakes and failed to find any humor in the situation. In the blue light of an exterior lamp, the chicken bone dragon cast a huge swimming shadow on the wall of the house, and when the wind blew just right, its ghostly teeth scraped against Ivan’s shoulder.

Seriously, would it kill Sam to leave a note? Ivan spent an hour searching for the guy, to confirm his guess about the first object, but Sam had disappeared. The ’67 Impala was still in the driveway, and there were plenty of rooms in the house, half of them locked. Ivan scratched at all of them, whispering Sam’s name and then calling it louder, but he got no response.

Did he get it correctly, the thing Sam was trying to tell him, or did he fixate on a random object and missed the real clue? How obvious was the clue supposed to be?

Ivan’s watch showed five to midnight. He sighed, set his coffee mug on the railing and went inside the house. Until the door closed and cut off the light, he didn’t realize how much noise there was in the desert, and now he felt its absence like a tugging in his stomach. There wasn’t a sound inside the house, except for the ticking of an ancient grandfather clock somewhere deep within. He came across that clock briefly while looking for Sam, stubbed a toe against its massive frame, too. Now it was making him think of that Peter Pan cartoon, as if he was in the belly of the crocodile that swallowed the clock. Just a few paces ahead, an arched doorway turned into the arch of a soft palate, leading down into the throat. Dry mistletoe that must’ve been a few years old and covered in cobwebs hung over the archway like a uvula. From within, from where the invisible clock was dropping seconds spilled a weak firelight. It probably had to be candles, too, just like it had to be midnight, like it had to be a chain, and three nights, and clues, and a dragon to suck his bones dry.

Ivan shook his head, and the monstrous throat became a dark hallway again. The light was coming from the old-fashioned study. He wiped his palms on his pants and stepped under the archway. 

Dean was seated in a chair straight out of some Gothic horror flick, surrounded by somebody else’s books and photographs. An oil lamp burned on the windowsill. Ivan squinted at the framed photos pushed into the corners of bookshelves, all of them of grim adults and children in sepia. He noticed them on his tour around the house earlier and wondered who they were.

Dean moved his foot, making the chain rattle. “So.”

Ivan looked around for a place to sit. There was a plain wooden chair across from Dean, and he settled there, trying to look relaxed. He had it, after all. There was no reason to be nervous. He cleared his throat, to make sure his voice was strong. “Who’s in the pictures?”

Dean picked one up and turned it in his hands. “The old dragon’s family. They all grew up and grew old, and the new generation didn’t know the guy at all. He told me.”

“The old dragon?” Ivan shifted in the chair, uncomfortable. “Was there another one before you?”

“Sure. Dude, do I look like I’m as old as Vegas?” Dean pushed up the cuff of his jeans absently and scratched at the reddened skin where the ankle bracelet did some damage. “There was a dragon in the desert before Las Vegas, too. He sat by the only well for miles and made people play the game with him, for water instead of wishes.” 

Ivan swallowed, thinking of the exuberant wishes of Uncle Cornelius’s friends, and of the simple wishes of dying men hundreds of years ago in the desert. “So how did you get the gig?” 

From somewhere within the house came a moan. Dean pursed his lips briefly, glancing toward the sound over Ivan’s shoulder. Ivan waited but the moan didn’t repeat. “What the hell was that?”

“That – don’t mind that. You came to Vegas because you heard rumors about this game. Sam and I heard them, too, only we were interested in the part where people were going missing.” He stood up from his chair and walked over to the window to fiddle with the oil lamp, making its flame jump and the shadows swell. Ivan figured him from the start for the kind of freak who couldn’t sit still for a minute, and sure enough, he was right. 

Dean went on, “We hunt monsters. But dude, there is so much bullshit floating around the Internet about dragons – go figure what’s true and what isn’t. Turns out that he who kills the dragon becomes the dragon.” 

The moan came again, and Ivan saw Dean’s fingers jump on the window’s frame.

“Hey man, where’s Sam?”

Dean waved a hand in the air in some vague gesture, and Ivan repeated it after him, exaggerated. “What’s that mean? Who the fuck is moaning back there? Where’s your brother?”

“Don’t worry about it. Sam’s just enjoying himself too much. Shall we?”

Ivan looked around at the doorway again. “Huh?”

Dean rolled his eyes and made another hand gesture, this time more explicit. 

Christ, seriously? Ivan was twenty and he had better self-control than that. “Does he have to be so loud?”

“Quit worrying about Sam.” Dean shifted uncomfortably. His leg was jerking a little, making the chain shake, and Ivan wondered if he even noticed. There was something unpleasant in the way Dean was looking at him – too attentive. “I’m thinking of an object, Ivan. You ready to guess what it is?” 

Ivan felt then, once more, the talon touching the tip of his nose – the memory so vivid it almost made him draw back. “A mango,” he said, feeling that the word was too small somehow for this room and for this night. He waited. 

The grandfather clock ticked on in the belly of the house. Dean was quiet, watching him without blinking, and Ivan thought that he could hear the fuse of the oil lamp burn. Sam cried out briefly and fell silent again.

After the longest time, Dean blinked again. He shrugged, taking his eyes off Ivan’s face, and it felt like a heavy weight shifting. “Yeah, okay,” he said. “Live another night.”

~~~~

The blue porch light grew pale in the blue light of early morning hours. Sam sat on the lid of the old well under an acacia tree, rubbing at the blue bruises on his wrists and looking obscenely content.

“So is it true?” Ivan asked. “Dean killed the old dragon and became the dragon himself?”

“Yeah.”

“How did he kill the dragon?”

Sam gave him a crooked little smile like he knew exactly what Ivan was thinking, which he probably did. “He played the game and won. Then he asked for the dragon’s life.”

“So Dean is going to be stuck in this house until someone else kills him and becomes the new dragon? Until after you die?” 

“No,” Sam said. “I’ll figure out a way.”

“Figure out a way not to die?”

“Ivan. You ask too many questions.”

Sam was grinning to himself but Ivan could see the worry underneath all of it, in the crease between his eyebrows and the certain tension around his eyes. Ivan learned to watch people from his father, training for the day he’d have to take over the business. 

“Aren’t you afraid to fall into the well?”

Sam stopped rubbing the bruises and touched his palms to the dry wood like he was petting it. “Go get some sleep.”

~~~~

A thunderstorm rolled in late in the afternoon, draped the sky in heavy clouds and made everything smell like wet dust. Ivan woke up to the low-level rumbling and lay still for a minute, with his heart beating in his throat. It was only thunder. His dreams were leaving quickly, and very soon he remembered nothing except a vague sense of dread and standing at the open mouth of a huge beast, hearing the beast’s stomach grumble.

He rolled out of bed and made his way into the kitchen, past more mementos from the old dragons he hadn’t noticed before – photographs, a locket, a faded old rag doll – all lined up on shelves and covered in cobwebs, older ones pushed deeper into corners by more recent dragons. How was the greatest game in Vegas so grim?

In the kitchen, he inspected the table and the fridge in the hopes that maybe Sam left a note this time. No dice. Another sandwich was waiting for him on a plate. Ivan eyed it, remembering distantly a maybe-dream and maybe-reality, in which he heard Dean behind the wall of his bedroom, rooting around in the kitchen. He could tell it was Dean by the dragging of that goddamn chain on the floor. Suppose the man had to make himself a cup of coffee sometime, but he could’ve been crushing drugs and mixing them into mayo just as likely. Ivan poked at the sandwich, then washed his finger and went searching through the cupboards. He found an unopened box of expired crackers in one. Could Dean have opened it discreetly, sprinkled drugs – or poison – over the crackers and sealed them back up? Ivan considered it, but finding the scenario unlikely, stuffed a handful of crackers into his mouth and took the rest into his bedroom to hide. They were soft and had a stale taste to them, and they were wonderful. 

When he came outside, Dean was straddling a porch’s railing, reading a book and munching on beef jerky. 

“So, my man. Is Sam here?” 

Dean raised his head from the book and fixed Ivan with a look, so calm and even. There was something of a reptile in that look. He knew, of course, the bastard knew everything. “Yeah, he’s around somewhere. He might have a shift tonight.”

Ivan gulped. “A shift?”

“He’s a bartender on the Strip, in a fetish bar. Picks up funny ideas there.”

Ivan hit a bit of a panic then, running around the house to try and find Sam before he left. The Impala remained parked out front, and whenever he came out to check on it just one more time, Dean gave him a wave. It was two hours before midnight when Ivan finally found Sam. One would think the dude was hiding on purpose. When he did find Sam, it was by the sound of an old record coming from the bedroom, some old man shit from before Ivan was born: _And if you don’t love me now, you can never love me again…_ Dean’s chain reached into the bedroom as well, which thankfully meant that the door was ajar.

Inside, awaited a full-blown sick-o show. Ivan swore in his head and backed away from the sight but stayed, keeping the clues in mind. 

In the room with the blackout curtains drawn tight, the only light came from several candles. They weren’t the sleek sexy type Ivan lit for his chicks sometimes but rather the ugly, thick ones that bled wax in fat droplets and smoked. They kept the deep shadows moving in the corners and around the bed, where Sam lay on top of the covers with Dean straddling his hips. At least both were wearing pants, and Dean even had a shirt on. Small mercies. Dean had his hands on Sam’s ribs, pressing firmly, running his hands up and down Sam’s sides with the rhythm of his breathing. Breathe in – down, breathe out – up, as if he was pumping Sam’s chest for him. Neither one was saying a word, only staring at each other and having some silent conversation Ivan couldn’t follow, and didn’t necessarily want to. Dean moved his hands up Sam’s torso and under his arms, thumbs reaching out for the clavicles, then over the shoulders and up the sides of Sam’s neck, pushing hard all the way like some weird massage, one hand coming up to grab the headboard and the other disappearing behind Sam’s head. Dean took a handful of Sam’s hair and pulled, exposing his neck and bending down to kiss it, then moving over to Sam’s mouth.

In the hallway, Ivan winced and shuffled from foot to foot, not knowing what to do with himself. On the one hand, clues. On the other, he just accidentally imagined doing that to his own brother and was wishing he could unsee the mental image. God, he hoped they weren’t going to fuck right now, because he didn’t sign up for creep porn.

The freaks were still kissing. Sam had picked up a loop of the chain and threw it over the back of Dean’s neck to pull him down, and it was probably going to bruise. _Damn your love, damn your lies,_ went the record. It wasn’t a particularly sexy song. Ivan personally preferred “Suga Suga” for such purposes. The record player itself was an old turntable – probably another relic belonging to some former dragon, which could explain the music selection as well. 

“So,” Dean said, straightening up, with the chain still draped over his shoulders, “what’s it going to be?” He grinned down at Sam, the candlelight catching in his eyes, and added, “Oh Muse.”

“Hey, you think the old man dragon had a muse?”

Dean made a face. “Nah. I bet he was too stubborn to let anyone.”

“What, to boss him around?” Sam pulled down on the ends of the chain, forcing Dean to bow his head. The record had stopped and was hissing quietly. Sam smiled up at his goddamn brother, all teeth and dimples. “There’s some rope under your pillow. Tie me to the bed, bitch.”

Dean grabbed the chain too, above Sam’s hands, resisting the slow pull. “Tell me the word, and I will. And it’s ‘Lord and Master’ to you, dude. Who’s getting tied to the bed, for fuck’s sake?”

Sam just rolled his eyes. “Hurry up. It’s going to be midnight soon.”

Dean pulled a coil of nylon rope from under the pillow and tossed one end over the bedpost. “Hands up.” Sam let go of the chain and lifted his arms, gripping the headboard. He flexed his muscles and arched his back a little when Dean ran the rope over his wrists, settling in like a large cat. Dean said, “The word, oh Muse.” 

_Chain,_ Ivan read in Sam’s lips.

~~~~

At three in the morning, the waxing moon sat high over the roof. Ivan could see it through the dusty skylight in the study’s ceiling as he was getting drunk with the Dragon of Las Vegas. There were nights in a man’s life not to be faced sober. He offered to share his precious leftover weed earlier, which Dean declined and in return brought a bottle of whiskey. He even demonstrated the unbroken seal and took the first drink. Ivan thought, what the hell. On an empty stomach, the alcohol hit too hard and too fast. With his feet up on the table, Ivan watched the moon through the skylight, smoked his joint and chased it with whiskey.

“You know what I’m gonna wish for when I win?”

“Tell me.”

Ivan pointed up with the joint, trying to pin down the moon. It was swimming in the sky, elusive. “I’m gonna wish to be able to fly. Then I can go to the moon.”

Dean thought about it, squinting up at the sky as well. “That’s kind of a cool wish, actually.”

“Wow, my man! Can you fly? You know, like a real dragon?”

Dean snorted and shook his head. The flame of the oil lamp jumped, and on the study’s wall Dean’s shadow twisted and crawled. Ivan imagined for a moment that it had wings, like those of a bat, but it didn’t.

“When you make your wish,” Dean said, “make sure I can hear you and that you word it straight up. What I hear will come true. There was this actress who wished Holly would love her forever. Well, the dragon heard ‘Hollywood’. She’s been dead for thirty years, and Hollywood still worships her. I don’t know about Holly, though. And anyway,” he added, a little sad, “you have to win first. One more night.”

Ivan waved him off. Two correct guesses down, one to go, and life was starting to look awesome. “Yeah, yeah. I mean, you know, right? You know Sam tells me?” The minute he said it, he wanted to bite his tongue. He watched Dean’s face carefully but saw no surprise there.

“Sure. That’s how you have to play this game. I hear that before, in the days when it was just the well in the desert, there were no clues. I don’t think people won much then.”

“But what’s the point if Sam just tells me? I don’t get it.”

Dean kicked his chair. “You want him to stop telling you? Don’t be such an idiot. Here, you want some chips? It’s a sealed bag.”

Ivan’s stomach rumbled. He took the offered bag and shoved a handful of chips in his mouth. They were cheddar, his least favorite, but he ate another handful before remembering to give some to Dean. 

“Sorry,” Dean said. “I really got nothing against you, man. You’re alright.” 

“Ha! But you’re still going to eat my bones if I lose?”

“No. I’m going to eat your meat, then throw your bones down into that well with the rest of them. Then I’m probably going to puke for a week until I look like, whatserface?” Dean took a sip of his whiskey and made a face up at the moon. “Those twins, whatever their names are. Look like death. I don’t think Hollywood even loves them now.”

Ivan hugged the bag of chips to his chest. Hell, the guy threatening to throw his bones down the well didn’t deserve any chips. “Do you have to?”

“Fuck if I know. You’re only our second, and the first guy won.” 

There was a moment of uncomfortable silence, and Ivan thought of Sam. It’s been a while since Ivan heard him make a sound, and he wondered if Sam was asleep, if he was still tied to that bed. Was he allowed to go to sleep? Ivan himself wasn’t into that sort of shit but he had some vague idea that this was how things went: Sam would have to call Dean ‘master’ and say ‘please’ and ask permission to come or to go to sleep. Well, something like that. Some people got off on weird crap. 

“You know, you two are incestuous hillbilly cannibals,” he said, as a continuation of the thought, “like in those horror flicks.”

Dean gave him a long considering look, then shrugged and went back to staring at the moon. “That we are.” 

“But won’t that make you sick? Like, to eat a human? I’d,” and he paused, trying to imagine what it would be like. “Gross.”

Dean sighed, putting his glass down on the table. “We’ve both been to hell, dude. Literally. That’s nothing. Now go to sleep.”

~~~~

At dawn of the third day, Ivan found Sam sitting cross-legged on the lid of the old well under the acacia tree again, scratching at it with his knife. He looked disgustingly pleased with himself.

“Tell me the third one now,” Ivan said. “I’m not watching another sick porno.”

“That’s not how it works.”

Ivan kicked the side of the well. “Fuck, man! You know I watch you, he knows I watch you, so what the hell? You’re up to something.”

“Of course we are. Come on, sit down.” Sam patted the well’s lid. It looked dried out with age, and Sam was, what, two hundred pounds? Ivan shook his head. 

“Calm down, Ivan. Find your third clue, tell the dragon your wish, and then go home.” 

The sky in the east was turning a gentle pink. The third and last day was starting, and at the conclusion of it, Ivan would go home as an unimaginably rich man. There, he’d tell Uncle Cornelius to shut his goddamn mouth about the guy and his island in the Caribbean. He hadn’t even thought of a wish yet. 

Sam was watching him, tapping out a rhythm on the lid with the tip of the blade. It made Ivan imagine someone knocking from the inside with skeletal fingers, to be let out of the cool, damp darkness.

“Sam. What would you wish for, if you were me?”

“For the game to be over for good,” he said as if he’d known the answer to that for a long time. “To have my brother back and go home.”

~~~~

Ivan woke up in his darkened room, unsure of what pulled him from sleep, and got momentarily scared that he overslept and missed his chance for the final clue. But the watch showed one in the afternoon – only four hours since he went to bed. A strip of bright light crept in between the curtains and fell at the foot of his bed, too far to wake him. There was yelling in his dream, he remembered. Then he heard voices.

“So how are you feeling?” Sam was saying.

“I don’t know, dude. Something’s weird.” 

Ivan rolled out of bed and tiptoed to the window, peeking around the curtain. The well stood wide open, with the lid pushed aside, and Sam and Dean were standing with their backs to Ivan, looking in. Sam was tapping a flashlight against his thigh. Ivan felt a shiver creep up his spine. The well must’ve been deep – weren’t they always, in a desert? Was there even any water down there, or just bones? Suddenly he could imagine the cold and the musty smell of the well like he was standing right next to its mouth. It must’ve been freezing in there. 

Dean said something else, too quiet to hear, and Ivan pushed up the window just a little, hoping that it wouldn’t make a noise as it slid up.

Sam said, “Are you sure you can handle it? Listen, maybe I should pick up some tranqs in town.”

“Fuck you, tranqs. So I could be a zombie all night? No way.” Dean walked halfway around the well and stood under the tree, hands shoved in his pockets and shoulders hunched. He looked for a moment like an angry bird of prey. 

“You’ve been acting a little edgy,” Sam said. “It’s the last night.”

_The last night,_ Ivan repeated to himself in the room, silently, only his lips moving. It was the last night of the game. 

“I’ll be fine, Sammy. Hey, you want to play tonight? That might get me relaxed.”

“Sure. Here, come sit with me.”

They sat down on the lip of the open well, staring down. They kept on talking, heads bowed close, too quiet for Ivan to make out a single word. 

When Ivan woke up again, the sun had already set. He finished his stale crackers and the chips from last night. An oddly numbing thought came to him that he didn’t need to squirrel away clean food anymore: after midnight, he was either going to walk out of here and have dinner at the best restaurant on the Strip, or his bones would tumble down the well to join all the others. What did those people want, the ones in the cold and the dark – thrill, money, fame, other people, health? He licked powdered cheddar off his fingers and went looking for Sam, with the food sitting in his stomach like a grease ball. 

Sam was in the kitchen, sharpening the knives. Ivan couldn’t hear Dean anywhere but saw the end of the chain stretching outside through the back door.

“Tell me,” Ivan said.

“You already had your clue.”

Ivan winced at the sound of the knife scraping against the stone. He had always hated that particular sound. “Would you stop that?”

Sam did, putting down the stone with a sigh. The knife he kept and went on turning it in his hands. 

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Ivan said. “I need the fucking clue, Sam.” 

“You had it. I couldn’t spell it out to your face if I wanted to. Look, I don’t pick the last object for him because it’s always the same. It’s the core element in the game, and it’s what everything always comes down to. It’s the one most important thing. You want some mac and cheese?” 

It had cheddar in it, but it came from a sealed box. Ivan waited by the stove while Sam cooked the food – in part to breathe in the aroma, in part to make sure nothing funny made its way into the pot. Through the window, he could see a part of the well. Dean was sitting on the lid, looking down between his knees as if he could see through the wood and inside. 

“Be careful with him tonight,” Sam said, stirring the pot, and Ivan shuddered. Up close, he could see more worry lines in Sam’s face, and the shadows under his eyes. “Dean isn’t himself when it’s this close to the end. Don’t drink with him, don’t smoke with him and don’t chat him up. Take your final guess, make your wish and get the hell out.” 

_And if I get it wrong?_ Was Dean going to sprout wings, shoot up to the ceiling like in a cartoon, all teeth and claws and scales? Would he start with biting the head off, at least, so it wouldn’t hurt for long? 

He couldn’t eat the mac and cheese after that. 

“Make sure that wish is clear,” Sam told him before he left the kitchen. “If he can’t hear or understand it, he can’t grant it. Make it loud and clear, and no ambiguity.”

~~~~

Ivan spent the remaining hours in his room, playing Angry Birds on his phone to keep his mind occupied. He glanced out the window now and again involuntarily, double-checking his last clue, as if staring at the thing was going to tell him anything. He bit his nails, for the first time since childhood, and sent bird after bird flying.

His nervous bladder got him out of the bedroom an hour before midnight. The house was dark and quiet, except for the rain pounding on the roof. The end of Dean’s chain disappeared down the basement’s stairs, and not a sound issued from below. Not wanting to draw Dean out, Ivan tiptoed down the hallway, stepping over the squeaky floorboards. He didn’t think twice about the light coming from the bathroom, until he was at the door and caught a glimpse of what was inside through the mirror. 

Sam was sitting on the edge of the bathtub, and next to his thigh were a small syringe and an empty vial. As Ivan watched, Sam tied a tourniquet around his upper arm, pulled the knot tight with his teeth and popped in the needle. 

This, Ivan realized with clarity that came out of nowhere, this he wasn’t supposed to see. Of all the intimate, disturbing, secret things he witnessed around the house in the past three nights, he wasn’t meant to see this one.

He retreated and waited in his bedroom, listening through the door for Sam’s quiet footsteps. For such a big dude, he never made much noise. After he was gone, Ivan waited another five minutes and returned to the bathroom, thinking that things were just getting more fun for him by the minute. Was Sam already loaded that evening, when he told Ivan about his final clue? Ivan always got a weird sense of humor when he got high, so who’s to say Sam wasn’t the same way? He locked the door and dug through the trash until the found the tiny glass vial.

“Lorazepam,” he read quietly from the label, frowning. He wasn’t very good with prescription drugs, but he thought it might’ve been a psychiatric one. Anti-anxiety, maybe? He tossed the vial back into trash.

~~~~

At midnight, Dean was waiting for him by the well, under an umbrella. Storm clouds had rolled in two hours ago, and rain was falling in sheets, turning the desert into mud. The water drummed on the roof and windows of the house, yanked at the acacia leaves and slapped against the ground. When Ivan came closer, the mud sucking at his flip flops, he could hear the rain trickling through the cracks in the well’s lid and echoing far down below. He thought that he could distinguish the flat sound of it hitting bone, but it could’ve been anything.

Dean’s jeans were soaked to the knee, and he didn’t seem to care. He was barefoot. The chain was probably freezing against his skin but he showed no discomfort, sitting in the wet and the mud with that ridiculous umbrella over his head, which wasn’t doing much. 

Ivan stopped a few feet away from him, holding on to his own slightly mangled umbrella he found in the closet. “Why are we here?”

“It has to be here on the last night.”

In the dark, it was difficult to see his face. There was something new in Dean’s voice, some unpleasant new undertone, and Ivan wished that he could see the facial expression that went with it. Don’t chat him up, Sam had said.

“I’m ready,” Ivan said.

“Okay. Hit me.”

Ivan drew a deep breath, and with it took in the smell of the rain, of the dirt and the wet shrubbery, and the sweet smell of acacia. “A well,” he said. “You’re thinking of a well.” 

He almost expected a clap of thunder but none came. Rain fell all around them and rang down between the old boards, and Dean sat perfectly still. Finally, he sighed. “Yeah, okay. I was thinking of a well.” There was almost palpable tension after those words, like he wasn’t done, like he was waiting for something else.

_Make your wish and get the hell out._ “I wish for the ability to turn invisible.” He shuffled his feet in the dirt, thinking that the wish had sounded silly. It had sounded childish, like “Dragon of Las Vegas” had sounded to him when he first came here. Dean was quiet. “I mean, not like to spy on girls in the shower or anything. I’m gonna take over my father’s business one day.” Dean still didn’t move and didn’t say a word. “Hey, you hear? I wish for the ability to turn invisible.”

Dean said, “Huh.” 

Ivan thought really hard about disappearing into thin air. He willed for his body to become transparent. When he lifted his hand to his face, it was still there and very much solid. “How do I turn it on? It’s not working.” 

“Interesting,” Dean said, speaking to the mud under his feet, as if he had forgotten that Ivan was there. “I guess I don’t really have to grant it.”

The rain thundered down all around them. Everything else was quiet. _Where the fuck is Sam?_ Something cold was running down Ivan’s spine, and he couldn’t tell if it was sweat or rainwater. 

“You,” his voice caught, and he tried again, “you have to.” 

“I guess I don’t. How about that?” Dean looked up, and Ivan saw then how different his face was from the first day. He didn’t look like Joe Schmoe of the Dump House anymore. There was an air of dark excitement about him, a carnivorous look. “I’ve been sitting here, wondering if I’d have to grant your wish, or if maybe I could just eat you instead.” Ivan took a reflexive step back. “See, it’s actually impossible for me to disobey the rules. I’d eat you now.”

Ivan took another step back, and his foot slipped on the chain. He lost his balance and landed on his ass, and in the next moment Dean was right there, kneeling over him, with a hand on Ivan’s chest – not restraining, just keeping him in place. Ivan gasped for air, of which there was not enough. Dean’s face was too close.

“I’d eat you, but I can’t. However, it appears that I don’t have to grant your wish. What I think we should do is keep on playing, until you guess wrong.” 

Ivan tried to scream, to call for Sam, but only a strangled sound escaped. He backed up on all fours, slipping in the mud. Ivan didn’t realize at what point he turned over but he made it into the house somehow, smacking twice against the plexiglas door before it occurred to him to slide it open. He stumbled into the dark room and ran into the hallway, tripping over a pair of shoes on his way. There were too many goddamn doorways, and he couldn’t think which one he needed.

“Sam! Sam!”

“In here!”

Ivan ran into the room which turned out to be the master bedroom, lit by the ugly candles again. Sam was kneeling on the bed, dressed in those leather pants and shirtless, his arms pulled back and cuffed to the headboard behind him. Ivan locked the door and leaned against it, trying to slow down his breathing so that he could hear. It didn’t sound like Dean followed him into the house. He realized that he was shaking. He had always thought that cold sweat was just an expression, but he could feel it now even with the rainwater on his skin, the sick feeling of burning hot on the inside and cold on the outside. 

Ivan hurried over to the bed and yanked on the chain of the cuffs. Somehow, he expected them to be fluffy and more symbolic than anything, but they were real handcuffs, the serious stuff. Sam stared at him over his shoulder.

“Where’s the fucking key?” 

“Dean has it. Sit down and breathe.”

Ivan did. A brief thought came and went that he just sat down on the bed in a goddamn sex dungeon next to a half-naked man, and he didn’t give a shit. It felt good to sit down. He was uncomfortably aware of the heartbeat in his chest, going too fast.

“Oh man,” he said after he caught his breath, “oh man, your brother, he’s gone batshit.” 

“I figured.”

Ivan leaped up to check that the window was closed, then sat back down again, cradling his head in his hands. His leg was shaking, beating an erratic rhythm against the floor, and he slapped a hand down on it to stop it. “It’s fine for you to be so calm, sitting here all doped up. He won’t eat you.” 

“There is a difference between being calm and not flipping my shit.” Sam head-butted him out of the blue, making Ivan jump. 

“What the hell, man?”

“I’d slap you if I could. Ivan. Focus, so that we could figure this out.” He nodded at the night stand. “There’s booze, if you need it.”

Ivan grabbed the whiskey and swallowed right from the bottle. It hurt in his chest and in his head and brought tears to his eyes, but then it felt better. He took another swig and waited for the pain to go away, for the bit of warmth and calm. He sat back down on the bed.

“Did you get the third one right?” Sam said. 

“Yeah. Yeah, I got it and I said my wish loud and clear, but nothing happened.” Ivan felt the panic starting to take over again, and he gripped the mattress and took a few deep breaths. It helped, and he finished, calmer, “And then Dean said that he wanted to eat me anyway and that we were going to play until I lost. But he can’t do that, can he?” 

Sam didn’t answer, but the look on his face was enough. Ivan dropped his head into his hands again. “I’m a dead man, aren’t I?” 

“You know, maybe not.” Sam shifted back a little to ease the strain on his shoulders. “You still have your wish. Maybe you can stop the game.”

“What, wish for the dragon’s life, like he did?”

Sam winced. “No, dude, that’ll just make you the next dragon – for about twenty seconds, before I rip your throat out.” 

Ivan was shaking his head before Sam even finished talking. “I already made a wish, and he just didn’t do his magic. Just like that. He said he didn’t have to.” 

“Maybe the well can. It’s the heart of the game, and it controls everything.” 

“I’m not going back out there.”

“Maybe you won’t have to,” Sam said. “Just open the window and yell that you wish for the game to be over. It’s worth a shot.”

It was worth a shot, and the whiskey at least got Ivan to stop shaking. He walked to the window and pulled the curtain aside. Dean was sitting on the lid again, completely soaked through, and he turned his head at the movement. Ivan paused, assessing how fast Dean could cover the distance between the well and the window and grab him. Dean was looking straight at him through the sheets of water, waiting. Ivan took a deep breath, threw open the window and yelled at the top of his lungs, louder than he had yelled in a long, long time, “I wish for the game to be over, you well motherfucker! I earned it! Make him do it!” 

And as the words left his mouth, he thought, _But I already said my wish right by the well, where it could hear me._

Something shifted imperceptibly. A smell of ozone in the air came from nowhere and made his nostrils tickle. In the yard, Dean stood up and took a tentative step forward, stretching his neck. In the room, Sam drew a sharp breath. And Ivan had a terrible feeling all of a sudden. He turned just as the gust of wind threw cold rainwater at his neck and made the candles’ flames jump. Ivan saw the room from that new angle in its whole, with all its shadows and its monstrosity that he had missed before.

Sam doubled up on the bed, his spine curving and his fingers flexing spasmodically. His enormous shadow on the wall twisted its claws and arched its reptilian neck. Its bat-like wings shot up and stretched across the ceiling, and as Sam gasped, his shadow clicked its jaw with the sharpest, longest set of teeth that reminded Ivan of something he saw in a paleontology museum as a child. The monster on the wall arched its back sharper than Sam could, until it was bent impossibly, until it folded itself in half. Its wings collapsed and were gone, its teeth and claws crumpled like burning paper. The shadow shrunk and shrunk, until it was that of a man kneeling on the bed with his hands cuffed behind him. 

“Dude,” said Dean’s voice right next to Ivan’s elbow, and he jumped, realizing that Dean had come up to the window and was looking inside. He turned his face up to Ivan’s and grinned – not like a man-eating monster but like a kid that just made something blow up. “It totally worked.” 

“Yeah, well,” Sam said into the covers, with his face still pressed against the bed. “Come get me out of the cuffs whenever you feel like it.”

~~~~

The first thing Dean did, right after climbing through the window to liberate Sam, was take the goddamn chain off. Ivan backed up into the corner and was watching from there, looking like he might cry or have a psychotic breakdown. Dean ignored him, which was probably best for the guy’s mental health. He threw the chain out the window as far as he could and went to take a long hot shower, which was number three on his personal list of things to do, once the whole thing was over. To take off the chain was number one. To kiss Sam was number two, but he wanted privacy for that one. He was done with the public performances for a while.

It was a long shower, and it was hot, and it was good. Dean stood under the spray until he felt like his muscles started to thaw, and then he scrubbed his body clean. The soap made the abused skin of his ankle sting. He welcomed it as a reminder of not having to drag the chain around anymore. That chain sounded like a cool idea in theory, worked great in practice, and he was kind of proud of himself for that one, but damn. 

When he got out, Sam had already changed into jeans and some old shirt. Dean stopped in the bathroom’s doorway, watching him across the hallway as Sam watched him back silently. Sam looked great, so much like himself again that it made something ache deep inside Dean’s chest. 

The house was very quiet around them. Dean said, “Is he gone?”

“Yeah. I offered to drive him but he told me to go fuck myself, so I called him a cab. He says ‘fuck you’, by the way.” 

Dean nodded. There was a deep sense of accomplishment in him. 

One more thing remained. Dean crossed the hallway quickly and drew Sam into a good long kiss, one to compensate for the past three days when it was tense and awkward as all hell with Ivan always watching. 

“You’re getting old,” Sam said. “You used to love showing off.”

“I’m not getting old. I’m aging gracefully.”

“Like cheese.” 

Dean flipped him off, stole another kiss and squeezed past him into the kitchen, to get the salt and matches. 

The rain was still pouring outside, and small streams ran through the mud from the porch to the acacia’s roots. Hell, when the sky over the desert decided to break in these parts, it wasn’t kidding. The rain lashed at the two abandoned umbrellas and at Ivan’s flip flops stuck in the mud. The iron chain lay across the yard like a snake, with its jaw of an open shackle gnawing on a mouthful of wet brush. It reminded Dean of something he wanted to ask.

“So. Rope and cuffs?” 

Sam shook his head. “Yeah, let’s never do that again, not unless you want to pump me full of benzos first. I couldn’t breathe, the first night.” 

“Sorry about that.”

“It kept me in the room, so it’s all good.”

Sam had assured him that it was some horrid environmental crime to dump gasoline into groundwater, but by the look of things, the well went dry a long time ago. Dean spent a few days investigating, stopping short of climbing down. Sam objected to that one, said it was a bad idea, and he was probably right. One thing for sure – there was no water down there. There were plenty of other things.

Dean pushed the lid aside. Although the water was long gone, it was still freezing inside, and that unnatural, deathly cold stung at his face. He couldn’t see in the dark, with the moon behind the clouds and the shaft being so deep, but he knew what was down there: ribs and long bones, pelvises and vertebrae and dozens and dozens of skulls with grinning teeth, all sitting on the bed of phalanges and metatarsals and of older skeletons crumbled into dust. 

Next to him, Sam stretched out his neck and leaned forward. Dean was about to grab him, but Sam drew back. 

As they looked down, the ghosts came out of the walls. They wore modern suits and expensive dresses, and track suits and old-fashioned three pieces, and baggy clothes of poor men. Mostly men, a few women, they all turned up their faces to look. They were crowding each other, standing on each other’s heads, just like their skulls were sitting on others’ skulls. 

“Let’s burn it,” Sam said.

Dean overturned a canister of gasoline into the cold mouth of the well and heard it hit the bones far down below and ring out against the collected rainwater. Sam dumped salt in, making the ghosts scatter. But they returned and gathered down there again, staring out of the darkness. Dean lit a book of matches and dropped them into the well.

At first, he didn’t think it was going to catch. They still had two canisters of gas back in the house, and he was contemplating making some Molotov cocktails, when all of a sudden the bones went up in a blaze. A wave of heat rose out of the well’s mouth and made him and Sam take a step back. Down there, the ghosts were going out in showers of sparks that flew up to the sky and hissed in the rain. Dean turned to look at Sam, at his ex-dragon finally back to his normal self. Sam was grinning back at him, and the fire of the burning ghosts lit up his face. He looked like he always did – at four by the campfire in Virginia, at eight by the candlelight when the power was shut off, at different ages in different states, in the cemeteries and by unmarked graves in the woods. It was and had always been the best thing for a cold, wet, miserable day – Sam’s smiling face in the firelight.


End file.
